A little (or not so little) talk about quilts...

My local library has a monthly craft feature, run by the Friends of the Library - sometimes it's a practical thing, sometimes it's just a talk, and the co-ordinator, whom I have known for years as our kids went to school together, asked me ages ago if I'd be willing to do a quilt talk (not a how-to, more of a trunk show).  Well, I'm pretty good at talking, and I have a lot of quilts I can show, so I said ok - today was the day. I took a big pile (several, really) of quilts, and kind of made it up as I went along. I showed a few to start, then we looked at some simple patchwork blocks and talked about construction and the stages of that. Luckily, I happened to have things in all stage of construction lying around the house - who'd have guessed!

Not many photos, unfortunately - we just put a table in the middle with some chairs around in a circle and I'd laid all the quilts out, sort of in a sensible order, on the table, and I peeled them back as I went.  The smaller art quilts, etc.  I sort of had out to the side, and we talked about those too and  about different kinds of community quilting (especially online, virtual stuff), like Block of the Month projects, Online Bees and Challenges, The Block Lotto, Quilt Swaps, Round Robins, and so on. It was really good fun, and I think the ladies who came (there were about a dozen - and yes, they were all ladies) - enjoyed it - I hope so!  Although it wasn't a practical session, one lady did bring along a hexagon piece she'd been working on for many years, with scraps of kids' clothes and other meaningful things, so we did have a quick chat at the end about what she might do to kind of finish it up  - I think it was a bit of a Topsy patchwork - it just grew!

I'm going to go back at some point later in the year to talk about ATCs - that will be a little show and tell, but also we'll do some practical stuff - probably do some round robins because that's sort of easier, and more social.